Free Spin by Robert Charles Wilson Page A

“If the world doesn’t come to an end in the next thirty or forty years,” he said, “we may be facing disaster.”
    Clouds began to roll in from the west An hour later that gorgeous blue sky was flatly overcast and raindrops began spattering the windshield. I put the headlights on.
    The news on the radio progressed from actuary tables. There was much talk of something else from recent headlines: the silver boxes, big as cities, hovering outside the Spin barrier, hundreds of miles above both poles of the Earth. Hovering, not orbiting. An object can hang in a stable orbit over the equator—geosynchronous satellites used to do that—but nothing, by the most elementary laws of motion, can “orbit” in a fixed position above the planet’s pole. And yet here these things were, detected by a radar probe and lately photographed from an unmanned fly-by mission: another layer of the mystery of the Spin, and just as incomprehensible to the untutored masses, in this case including me. I wanted to talk to Jason about it. I think I wanted him to make sense of it for me.
     
     
    It was raining full-out, thunder rumbling through the hills, when I finally pulled up at E. D. Lawton’s short-term rental outside Stockbridge.
    The property was a four-bedroom English country-style cottage, the siding painted arsenic green, set into a hundred acres of preserved woodland. It glowed in the dusk like a storm lantern. Jason was already here, his white Ferrari parked under a dripping breezeway.
    He must have heard me pull up: he opened the big front door before I knocked. “Tyler!” he said, grinning.
    I came inside and set my single rain-dampened suitcase on the tiled floor of the foyer. “Been a while,” I said.
    We had kept in touch by e-mail and phone, but apart from a couple of brief holiday appearances at the Big House this was the first time we’d been in the same room in nearly eight years. I suppose the time showed on both of us, a subtle inventory of changes. I had forgotten how formidable he looked. He had always been tall, always at ease in his body; he still was, though he seemed skinnier, not delicate but delicately balanced, like a broomstick standing on end. His hair was a uniform layer of stubble about a quarter-inch long. And although he drove a Ferrari he remained unconscious of personal style: he wore tattered jeans, a baggy knit sweater pocked with balls of unraveling thread, discount sneakers.
    “You ate on the way down?” he asked.
    “Late lunch.”
    “Hungry?”
    I wasn’t, but I admitted I was craving a cup of coffee. Med school had made a caffeine addict of me. “You’re in luck,” Jason said. “I bought a pound of Guatemalan on the way here.” The Guatemalans, indifferent to the end of the world, were still harvesting coffee. “I’ll put on a pot. Show you around while it’s brewing.”
    We trekked through the house. There was a twentieth-century fussiness about it, walls painted apple green or harvest orange, sturdy barn-sale antique furniture and brass bed frames, lace curtains over warped window glass down which the rain streamed relentlessly. Modern amenities in the kitchen and living room, big TV, music station, Internet link. Cozy in the rain. Downstairs again, Jason poured coffee. We sat at the kitchen table and tried to catch up.
    Jase was vague about his work, out of modesty or for security reasons. In the eight years since the revelation of the true nature of the Spin he had earned himself a doctorate in astrophysics and then walked away from it to take a junior position in E.D.‘s Perihelion Foundation. Perhaps not a bad move, now that E.D. was a ranking member of President Walker’s Select Committee on Global and Environmental Crisis Planning. According to Jase, Perihelion was about to be transformed from an aerospace think tank into an official advisory body, with real authority to shape policy.
    I said, “Is that legal?”
    “Don’t be naive, Tyler. E.D.‘s already distanced